Legal Positions and Institutional Complementarities

Abstract

Legal positions (such as rights, duties, liberties, powers, liabilities and immunities) are linked together by strong institutional complementarities that differ from the usual institutional complementarities that have been recently considered in economic literature. Legal positions not only satisfy the usual conditions of institutional complementarity stemming from the fact that legal positions that fit together are marginally better than those that do not. They also define legal equilibria characterized by the social scarcity constraint that is typical of positional goods.

Keywords: legal positions, institutional complementarities, contracts, property law, industrial organization, capitalist systems

JEL Classification: J41, J50, K11, K12, K22, K31, L20, P10